


world and time enough

by Della19



Series: more time [1]
Category: DC Cinematic Universe, Wonder Woman (2017), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, But it's not really a kid fic, F/F, F/M, Fix-It, THERE IS A KID, War, Wonder Woman 2017 spoilers, this movie gave me all the feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-08 19:19:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11088219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Della19/pseuds/Della19
Summary: The story Hippolyta told her daughter when she was a child was that she carved her from clay. That Zeus breathed life into her, this child she so desired, that she came into being.This, Diana learns, for all that it was a kindness, was a lie.Diana tells her daughter the truth; that she was born of love. Imperfect, too brief,humanlove.The truth, Diana thinks, the ticking echo of Steve’s watch pounding away in her head - herheart- is rarely a kindness.Or Diana;after.





	world and time enough

***************************

 

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

― **J.R.R. Tolkien** , **The Fellowship of the Ring**

 

***************************

 _After_ , the war ends.

 

 _Well_ , Diana thinks, _this is not entirely truth_.

 

The war to end all wars ends.  _War_ himself ends, atoms scattered to the wind, little more left of him than her mother’s stories and warm ozone in the Belgian sky. 

 

But war itself – that thing that lived in all these humans’ eyes, lived even in _his_ eyes – it never really ends. A man kills a woman in a lover’s quarrel. A mother strikes her child in the street.  Brothers fight with brothers over nothing that matters.

 

This is not to say that there is not goodness in this world of course.  Men engulf their brothers in blood and arms in joyful embraces.  Children dart through crowds, their laughter echoing in the air as they play.  Humanity continues, neither good nor bad; perfectly imperfect.

 

A man takes the hand of a woman, sways with her to music only they can hear, lost in each other.

 

She has to look away.

 

Steve is gone. 

 

Diana is still here.

 

***************************

 

She’s not quite sure which is worse.

 

***************************

The war needed Diana. 

 

The world after it, less so.

 

After, there is mostly politics, which Diana is singularly unsuited for.  Diana may be a princess, but she was never overly gifted as a diplomat.  Diana sought Antiope rather than the senators for her tutors, because Diana has always felt that call to arms, signing its sweet song in her very veins.

 

Diana does not think of Ares; of her _brother_.  She cannot, yet.

 

This world does not need Diana.

 

And yet, Diana finds herself staying. 

 

The boys do not, and Diana cannot find it in herself to blame them.  They too lost Steve, and so many others as well, and they all have lives they need to live.  They each come to her and say good bye at least, and take a night to drink to the fallen, to listen and sing to Charlie’s songs and when they part, it is not allies that had known each other for a few short days, but friends who feel like they have known each other forever.

 

Etta, on the other hand, says in Britain, and makes an offer to Diana to stay with her.  Etta, Diana had not known, has a mate – a husband, she thinks, and does not let herself linger on a conversation on boat, of _til’ death does them part_ and sparkling blue eyes – a tall doctor with a kind face and laughing eyes and two children, a boy and a girl each. 

 

The man, Harry, was a medic in the war, and the children, a bright eyed boy of six and the girl, a smiling little moppet of red curls of four were secreted away, safe at a relative’s farm in the country.  When Etta catches sight of at the train station she _runs_ to them, uncaring of convention or what is proper, sweeps them into her arms and _sobs_ in pure joy, as they hold each tight to each other, as if they fear letting go.

 

This, Diana thinks, is _love_.  This is what it was really all for.  The world is broken, crumbling, but still there is love, and so it goes on, as it should. 

 

So Diana accepts; stays, helps to rebuild. 

 

***************************

 

She tucks the watch Steve left her into a pocket by her heart, and this is where it remains.  Sometimes, when it ticks, she can fool herself into thinking it is his heart beat, reverberating in her chest, as it had been that night in Veld where he had put his mouth on hers, and had done his very best to convince her that Cleo’s convictions on males and pleasure were not quite right.

 

He had very much succeeded. 

 

The watch ticks.

 

Steve is still gone.  Death has done them part. 

 

Time passes. 

 

***************************

 

For all her inhuman strength, rebuilding is still strenuous work.  Heavy stones need to be hauled, huge wood support beams need to be placed, and tanks and cars, derelict where they lay need to be dragged away, crushed and melted down into new things of peace, like swords into plowshares. 

 

For several blissful weeks, Diana wakes each morning with a purpose and crawls into bed exhausted enough to forget. 

 

Then one morning she wakes, and bolts for the privy, retching up her dinner.

 

Diana never became ill on Themyscira, but then, no Amazon did.  Sickness was as much a stranger to the island as was age and strife.  But, the feeling passes quickly enough, and Diana is no longer a resident of Themyscira, so it stands to reason that here, in this world, she might be susceptible to the illnesses of man. Diana has seen men become sick quickly like this after consuming tainted food, and so she, given that she feels fine now, attributes it to this, and gives it little thought for the rest of the day. 

 

Except it happens the next morning. And the morning after. And the morning after that. 

 

It’s on the tenth morning that Etta that finally asks the question that has not even occurred to Diana.  Etta, who comes forward with a cool compress, soft hands and kind eyes and asks, quietly, a question Diana can see she already knows the answer to. “Is there any chance you could be pregnant?”

 

_The tingling cold of snow on her face, swaying with his face so close to her own, her mouth on his, his body over hers, in hers, as they had both gasped and sighed and fallen in love._

 

Her answer is somewhat lost to her retching, but Diana knows Etta understands it well enough.

 

_Yes._

***************************

 

Hippolyta told her daughter she carved her from clay, that she desired a child _so_ much that her wish was brought into life by Zeus. From what Ares told her, Diana thinks this likely was a lie, but she supposes it hardly matters in either case.

 

Diana, it seems, has unequivocally managed to do it the…more _traditional_ way.

 

***************************

 

Diana heals quickly. Her flesh knits together after each wound seamlessly, leaves her with nary a scar. 

 

Her throat still aches from screaming his name. Sometimes, she feels as if her skin burns from a fire that never touched her, bloomed in the sky, and took him from her.

 

Diana’s skin is unblemished.

 

Diana is covered in scars.

 

Their daughter kicks her, banging against her abdominal wall and her organs, little hurts that leave no mark, but that Diana knows she will always feel the remembrance of. 

 

Not all of her scars are bad.

 

***************************

 

Pregnancy is…a whole new world. Diana has once already left everything she has known and ventured into a new and alien place, but it has _nothing_ on this new _terrifyingly joyful_ adventure. 

Themyscira had no children besides Diana herself, and although she had read the books on reproductive biology, a textbook offers nothing on the reality of what it is like to feel a child move within in you, to have your breasts ache and swell and your clothing no longer fit, as your back continually aches. 

 

Occasionally, she thinks she can see the appeal in the clay method.

 

And yet, these are the easy worries.  Rather, it is the anxiety of what she is about to do that strikes her hardest, leaves her off guard, overwhelms her with its enormity.  Diana has never so much as even _held_ an infant, and now she is supposed to be able to care for one? To raise one, to know how to protect it and love it?

 

To know how to be a mother?

 

It is Etta, then, that becomes her rock. Etta, with her calm smile and British efficiency who brews her tea and fetches her ice cream – still, a modern triumph – and sits with her.  Who says, when Diana has calmed enough to hear it, “Not everyone is meant to be a mother, I’ll not lie to you,” And Etta takes her hand in her own, and says, with her contagious smile, and wisdom beyond Diana’s thousands of years, “But I have no fears when it comes to you.  All you have to do is believe it.”

 

Diana is working on it. 

 

The boys come back, one by one, bringing gifts for the baby.  From Chief, a beautiful dreamcatcher, made with love from the finest leathers and beads. From Sameer, a crib of oaken wood, carved she can tell, by his own hand. But it is from Charlie that comes the gift that she cannot help but be overcome by, as he presents her quietly with a single sheet of paper that holds a gift indescribably precious.

 

Because it is the photograph of the five of them, that day in Veld that looks back at her.  The image of Steve that looks back, how she always tries tries to remember him; alive, eyes sparkling, fighting for those that could not fight for themselves.

 

Diana blames her tears on the baby. Charlie is kind enough not to say anything.

 

***************************

 

Helen Antiope Trevor, Princess of Themyscira is born on a warm August morning, the result of several hours of hard and painful labour.  She comes into the world screaming, and when the doctor sets her upon Diana’s chest she is still covered in blood, with her little eyes squished together and her head shaped not unlike an ice cream cone.

 

She’s the most _beautiful_ thing Diana has ever seen. 

 

“Hello Helen,” Diana whispers reverently, into the silence born of the fact that her senses have seemed to be unable to extend pass the tiny body of her daughter, “I am your mother.”

 

Diana had not even known this kind of love was _possible_.

 

Diana remembers Hippolyta’s anger at Antiope, the likes of which she had never seen her mother direct at her sister, when she had found them training. Her mother had wanted nothing more than to keep Diana a child, safe on Themyscira, innocent as long as she possibly could.  As a child, and even as the woman she had been when she had followed Steve off the island, Diana had never truly understood why.  After she had seen the ugliness of war, she thought perhaps she had known the answer, but now, oh _now_ , she knows she had been so wrong. 

 

Looking at her daughter, at this tiny little perfect person, Diana finally _understands_.

 

Diana is a mother, a god and a warrior, and if anyone ever _dared_ to hurt her daughter, she would make sure to use all of her power to make sure they _regretted it._

 

***************************

 

When Diana does return to the shores of Themyscira, it is not how she left; an Amazon, filled with surety of her childish beliefs, on the vessel of the old world.  Rather, it is as god, on a motorised ship, borrowed from mortals, with her own daughter cradled in her arms, finally an adult.

 

And yet, when the island finally comes into sight and Diana sights her mother standing on the dock, waiting for her, she has never in all of her life felt more like a child.  Diana has come to Themyscira unsure of her welcome, but when her feet hit the dock of the island, her mother is already there, has already pulled her into an embrace, and Diana knows her fears were for naught.

 

This island, and her mother will always be a home to her.

 

And it is there, cocooned in the arms of her mother, her own daughter nested, sleeping and swaddled in her arms, that Diana finally breaks down, and _weeps_. 

 

Later, much later, after Diana has told her story and Hippolyta has told hers; after their tears have dried, and after her mother – and every Amazon on the island – have taken their turns holding and cooing over Helen, Diana lays cradled in her mother’s embrace as she used to when she was a child.   

 

“She has his eyes, his hair,” Diana says, looking at her daughter, and her mother makes a sound of agreement before she says, with a smile Diana can hear in her voice, “I fancy she has your nose and chin.”

 

Diana is not yet brave enough to ask her mother what of her own face belonged to her father. 

 

“You could stay,” her mother offers suddenly, never taking her eyes away from Helen, where she slumbers in a bassinet Diana knows must have once been her own, and Diana’s heart swells at the offer, even though she already knows her answer.   

 

“I cannot,” Diana says quietly, surely, but without malice, for surely as there is a part of her that wants to, there too is a large part that knows it would not be for the best. “She is not only a child of this place, but of her father’s world as well. I do not want her to grow up without living in that which he gave his life for.”

 

Her mother only sighs, as if she had expected no other answer from her, and turns to look at her this time as she asks, vulnerable in a way Diana has never seen her mother before, “Will you come back at least, to visit?”

 

“Always,” Diana says fiercely, and tightens her arms around her mother, “ _Always_.”

 

***************************

 

The story Hippolyta told her daughter when she was a child was that she carved her from clay. That Zeus breathed life into her, this child she so desired, that she came into being.

 

This, Diana learns, for all that it was a kindness, was a lie.

 

Diana tells her daughter the truth; that she was born of love.  Imperfect, too brief, _human_ love.

 

***************************

 

And so, Diana does just as she said she would.  Takes her daughter, returns to the world of men, and settles in London, the city brought he to – _their_ city -  and tries to make a life for them in this new world of peace, for however long it will last.

 

In the end, they have only two measly decades. 

 

Helen grows from an infant to a cheerful toddler, to then a curious child and then somehow, in the span of what feels like a blink of Diana’s eye, she is suddenly a gracious and beautiful young woman looking back at Diana with her father’s cerulean blue eyes and golden hair.  It seems to Diana that this transformation should have taken eons, that something so momentous should have taken so much longer.

 

And yet, it is so short of a time.  It takes only twenty-one mortal years for her daughter to grow up; only twenty-one years for this peace they had fought for, that Steve had _died_ for, to crumble.

 

In the end, war finds them once again.

 

***************************

_The truth_ , Diana thinks, the ticking echo of Steve’s watch pounding away in her head - her _heart_ \- _is rarely a kindness_.

 

***************************

 

They call it the Second Great War, but Diana can think of nothing great about it.  Once again, men fight with men. Women weep and hold their dying children to their chests.  And Helen, now grown but always her baby, comes to her, and declares with an intent she is sure that Hippolyta had looked upon in Diana’s own face once, that she is going to join the war effort as a nurse, to help heal those who will bleed and break and die from the cruelty of war.

 

 _I wish we had more time_ , Steve had told her, and _oh_ , does Diana wish the same. 

 

“My love,” Diana says, cradling her child’s face in her hands, as her mother did once to her, and as Steve will never get to, and says, though it is the hardest thing she has ever had to do, “Do what you must.”

 

Diana does the same. 

 

Diana enters this war differently than her first, tries to learn from her mistakes.  She focuses not on individuals, but on the people she can save. On the villages like Veld, where ordinary people and their lives were overtaken by tyranny. Helen sends her letters from the front, that reach her eventually, and Diana tucks them away, keeps them safe and treasured to her heart, tucked away with Steve’s watch, her fuel to keep fighting.

 

She saves some, she _does_. 

 

Diana destroys tanks, deflects bullets and plows through soldiers.  Afterwards, people come out of hiding, tears of gratitude in their eyes, and she tries her best to help them rebuild, to teach them to fight so that they might not fall again, as Veld had.

 

And yet.

 

She loses so, _so_ many. 

 

Diana stops counting the number of villages that are burning, or already long burnt by the time she reaches them.  The mass graves, the blood, the weeping mothers and the dying children.

 

When the dust finally settles on this terrible war, the count is at more than fifty million souls dead.  More than three million alone to the ovens. 

 

Diana walks out into a field, turns up her face to the sky and whom and what so ever might be left of the gods and screams and screams and _screams_.

 

Helen comes to her later, when she has made her way to Paris, and there are tears in her daughter’s eyes and the remnants of flaked blood beneath her nails from the unendingly supply of bleeding soldiers. And Diana can do nothing more than hold her daughter, love her as she whispers of her desire to go to Themyscira, to become strong enough to fight evil such as this.

 

Diana understands the need, but she too understands that it will not help.  Diana is a god, trained by the strongest of all of the Amazon warriors, and even she could not stop war, this consequence of humanity. 

 

Diana killed her brother and Steve sacrificed himself, and for _what?_

 

Love was not enough.

 

Still, Diana is a mother, and so she only holds her daughter, as tight as she can, and then lets her go, to make her own way, to learn her own impossible lessons. 

 

As for herself?

 

Diana is done with trying to save this world. 

 

**************************

 

While Helen is away, Diana finds herself searching for a new purpose.  She tries aiding in rebuilding, as she had before, but this time, a new cause catches her attention.

 

The Nazis had taken art, these tangible reminders of beauty and the past, had burned them and stole them from the people they had slaughtered, and there is something about this crime that Diana cannot stand for.  Art has always called to her, these manifestations of love and sorrow and joy made of clay and marble and oil and canvas, and Diana can think of few more hideous injustices than to rob people of their very emotions.

 

And so, this is how Diana finds herself dabbling in a little…reacquisition. 

 

Sometimes, thieves wake up in the morning and find this thing they stole or bought with blood money gone, and curse and rail and throw tantrums.  Sometime people who had lost almost everything wake up and find a painting or a sculpture returned to them, and weep tears of joy, not for the item itself, but for what its return represents. 

 

There is, Diana thinks, some comfort to be had in that. 

 

**************************

 

The watch ticks.

 

Helen returns from Themyscira, strong and grown and so very beautiful, a new self-assurance in her eyes.  She declares her intention to become a doctor like Etta’s husband, to heal the broken and the wounded.  Diana has never been more proud of her daughter when she does just that; stands, the only woman in her graduating class, and dedicates her life to the pursuit of helping mankind to heal. 

 

Diana starts working at a museum, her years of…experience with antiques somehow translating into a career in antiques restoration and brokering, which pleases her as much as it amuses her daughter.

 

Sameer dies.

 

His heart just stops one day. He was on stage, where he’d spent the last couple decades of his life, the actor he had always wanted to become.  Diana attends his funeral, shrouded in black, and it heartens to see at least that it is full of people that he had loved, including several children and grandchildren, and who had loved him in return. 

 

Then Charlie dies. His death, however was not so quick.  His liver fails, and when Diana visits him in the hospital in his last days he is pale and wane with illness, but when he brightens and smiles at her he takes years off himself.  At his funeral, Diana can still hear his voice singing as he had been in the hospital, about ‘a bonnie las.’ His funeral too is full of people whom had loved him; his partner, a tall Scotsman speaks of the great life he’d had, of all the lives he had touched and good he had done.  Diana hopes he’s finally found some peace away from his ghosts. 

 

Chief is next. One of his granddaughters calls to tell her he had passed on to start his next journey peacefully in his sleep. Diana flies over for his funeral as well, and although the ceremony is different because of his culture, she finds there is much the same. People who loved him smile and talk of him fondly, and Diana breathes in sweet smoke and thinks of the man she had met, alone and without a tribe, and how much has changed. 

 

And then one day Helen comes to her, love in her eyes, and presents both shyly and proudly her with a young Chinese woman she met on her travels, a student of history with sharp intelligent eyes and a smile that lights up the room.  Helen appears no older than when she had returned from Themyscira years ago, and for all that Diana is eternally grateful that her daughter has inherited this legacy from her, she knows there will come a time that Helen will no longer feel that way. The woman she has fallen in love with, and whom Diana can see plain as day loves her daughter back, is a human.

 

Mortal. 

 

The watch ticks.

 

Diana is _oh so_ very sick of wearing the colour black. 

 

Time passes. 

 

***************************

 

Etta is the last of their little group to die.  Diana had known it was coming; Harry had passed quietly in his sleep a couple of months ago, and Etta has been slowly wilting since. 

 

“Are you happy?” Etta asks her, and for all that Diana is thousands of years older than she, it is Etta yet that somehow seem older and wiser, the skin of her hand paper thin and soft with age between Diana’s fingers, her own still firm with deceptive youth. 

 

And Diana wants to says _yes_ , feels like she should, because Etta is dying and she only wants to be able to offer her comfort, but the word gets stuck in her throat, and Diana ends up saying nothing.

 

“It’s alright,” Etta says, a soft smile on her face, and her eyes are so, _so_ kind and bright, “I believe you will be, one day.”

 

And Diana can only smile at her, and hold her hand. The last thing Etta believed in about her ended up being true. 

 

It is the last time Diana ever sees her. 

 

Etta Candy dies at the age of 92. She dies as she lived; surrounded by her friends, children and grandchildren, loved and _happy_. 

 

Diana finds herself hoping this one will as well.

 

***************************

 

And then one night, Diana is awakened from her slumber by the crescendo of thunder, and as she stares at the play of lighting across her walls, she knows one thing with certainty. 

 

There is someone in her home. 

 

When she reaches her kitchen, moving on silent feet, sword in her hand, she notes that her intruder is a man, taller than six feet, with sandy hair liberally sprinkled with grey, who holds in large hands a framed picture of her daughter and the woman she loves.  And then he turns, and _looks_ at her and Diana realizes that she was wrong; this is no man.

 

 _So this is from whom she inherited her eyes_ , Diana thinks, as lightning flashes.

 

There is, Diana realizes, a presumed dead god in her home.

 

“Zeus,” Diana says into the silence between the thunder claps. Not _father_ ; she is not ready for such an address. Perhaps she will never be. 

 

The king of the gods takes no offence it seems, only nods once, a regal thing, and returns in kind a greeting of only, “Diana.”

 

There is so much Diana wants to say; wants to know why he is here, how he is here. Why if he is alive he has not visited before. Why, if he was alive, he did not end Ares himself, and spare those millions of deaths and Steve, Steve, _Steve_.

 

“My mother told me you were dead,” Diana settles on, because she cannot make the others leave her throat.  Something that might be pain flashes across the god’s face, before he says quietly, rubbing his thumb slowly over the curves of the metal of the frame, “Your mother thinks I am dead.  It was…kinder that way.” 

 

“Your daughter is in love,” the god says, cutting off the denial Diana can feel building in her, gesturing to the framed photograph he holds in his hand, one Diana took herself, of a smiling Helen and Mei, both radiantly happy.   

 

“With a mortal,” Diana finds herself saying, unable to keep the hint of bitterness, of _blame_ , out of her voice, for Mei has already begun to show some age compared to Helen’s static face, “It will break her heart.”

 

 _It broke mine_ , Diana does not say. She thinks he hears her regardless. 

 

“It does not need to,” the god says simply, and from thin air he produces a bowl of pure gold that holds in it a gelatinous liquid that shimmers like diamonds, sets it without fanfare down on her kitchen table. 

 

Diana was raised on the stories of the gods; she knows ambrosia when she sees it. The food of the gods, that brought longevity and eternal youth to anyone who consumed it. The gods did not offer it frivolously.  The momentous nature of the gift throws her for a second, shakes her to her very core. 

 

“Why?” She finds herself asking, and it is a question that covers more than just why he has given this too her. 

 

“You were born of love,” Zeus says finally, with quiet, utter surety, this non sequitur, “No woman has ever wanted or loved a child more than Hippolyta.”

 

“And you?” Diana asks, and she cannot say what possess her to do so, except that it is suddenly so important that she _know_.  To know if she had just been a pawn, created to for the purpose of murdering her brother when their father could not or…something else. 

 

“I needed a god killer,” Zeus says finally, heavily, and then, softer, in what Diana knows is a secret for only them to share, “I wanted a child.”

 

Diana can think of nothing to say in response.

 

“I woke from what should have killed me, weak and little more than mortal, and ran from a woman who loved me, and our child.  And even as I slowly regained some of my powers, I could not face her, or you…or my son,” Zeus continues, and Diana is almost five millennia old, but there is something ancient and pained even to her in his eyes as he looks at her. “I do not deserve to be your father.”

 

“It’s not about what you deserve,” Diana says slowly, as Steve had said to her and she to Ares, all those years ago, and it is a true now as it was then, “but rather what you believe.”

 

“Perhaps,” he allows, but his expression does not soften. “I believe am not a good father,” he says bluntly, and then meets her eyes again, pins her with that too ancient stare until she has no choice but to see the truth in it. “Perhaps I never was. But if you are to believe one thing, let it be this; you are loved.”

 

And for a second, Diana looks upon the king of the gods and sees only a man who watched, unable to save everyone he loved from death at the hands of his own son. Who, to save an entire race of his creation, had done the impossible thing of sending his child to kill his only other living child. 

 

A man entirely alone, but for the company of his regrets. 

 

Then, there is a flash of lightning and he is gone, and it is Diana who finds herself alone, with only a bowl of ambrosia and her thoughts to keep her company.

 

***************************

 

The watch ticks.  Thus, time must pass.  The progression of it still does not touch her; her face upon the glass is still the one that Steve cradled in his hands, and tried to explain the fallible nature of man. 

 

She misses him still.

 

She thinks often of Etta, and her question.  Diana has a daughter she loves, who herself is happy in love, the ambrosia Zeus gifted Diana running through her Mei’s veins. A mother whom adores her and that she is free to visit, and a father that… A job that brings a smile to her face, and lovers that come and go; men and women that bring pleasure to her life.

 

Her sword and shield stay untouched in their closet. She does not wear Antiope’s sigil.  For all that her lovers bring her pleasure, her heart never warms and quickens like it did with Steve, when there was _love_.  The watch still ticks, steady and constant, unchanged, like the beat of her heart.

 

She is not happy.  But she thinks perhaps, that she is at least _content_. 

 

It is enough for Diana. 

 

And then a mortal named Alexander Luthor III takes something from her that she cannot bear to lose, and Diana opens that closet and finds herself once more.

 

***************************

 

“I don’t suppose you were going to tell me about the alien death monster that almost levelled two cities and killed the resident Kryptonian superhero,” Helen says chidingly, but lightly so, from the terrace of Diana’s Paris penthouse.  Her hair is windswept, and Diana knows this means she left her wife and flew over, worry fueling her. 

 

There is the tiniest swell of her abdomen, just visible as the wind blows her loose shirt close to her body.  Modern medicine has come leaps and bounds and yet sometimes Diana thinks it is not so different from clay and wishes. 

 

Her daughter - the baby she held in her own arms all those years ago - is four months pregnant. 

 

“No, I was not,” Diana agrees, and then continues before her daughter can gear up into an argument so familiar that Diana knows the words to it off by heart, “You do not agree with me on this, but I am still your mother.” And then, drawing her daughter into a hug, feeling that curve press up against her own body, and rubbing a light, comforting hand over back, she says, with meaning, “You will understand soon enough.”

 

Helen says nothing in response, just clings a little tighter to her, and Diana knows she has been forgiven. 

 

***************************

Bruce sends her the photograph on a Wednesday. She has no idea from what depths he managed to find it, but she is impossibly grateful all the same.  It has been too long since she has had only the watch and her own fallible memory to remember him by.

 

The watch stops working on that Sunday.  Just ticks one last time, and then _stops_ , and for a brief second, Diana fears that it is instead her _heart_ that has stopped, rather than the watch.

 

Steve Trevor died on a Sunday.  It too was quite sudden. 

 

Diana works in antiques, but she has no knowledge of how to repair a watch, and no desire to fool around with something so precious.  The logical alternative is to find a repairman, but is a Sunday, the day of rest, and Diana knows that most of the shops she might have frequented will be closed, so that their keepers might enjoy a day with their families and loved ones. 

 

She does not think she can bear even one day of this silence. 

 

And so, she sets off from her apartment, and hopes that she might be able to find a shop open. Instead of heading to her usual shopping areas, she takes a turn into the more touristy area around Montmartre, hoping that there might be some place open, trying to capitalize on the income to be made by an endless stream of tourists.  Sure enough, as she turns down one of the winding cobblestone roads towards the Cathedral, she finds an open shop that boasts a store front of lovely old pocket and wrist watches, displayed well on elegant leather displays.

 

 _World and Time Enough_ , the sign proclaims in English, and then in smaller print, in both English and French, _Watch repair and sales._

 

The bell over the door chimes merrily as Diana steps over the threshold, and finds herself the only patron in the store.

 

“Be with you in just a second!” a male voice shouts from the back of the store, in an accent that sounds American, muffled slightly by the rustling of something that sounds like boxes being shuffled about, and so Diana takes this time to appraise the store.  It’s a pleasant place, all old wood and leather, with enough light from the sales windows to stop it from becoming dull.  It’s hardly modern though, for all that it does feature a neat display of new watches, shining in silvers and golds.  Rather, she almost feels as if she has stepped back in time a century, and she stamps down the nostalgia that springs up at the thought, putting it away as the sound of footsteps draws nearer.

 

“Sorry about that,” the voice says from behind her, clearer now, and as Diana starts to turn towards it he asks, “What can I do for you?”

 

And then she does turn, and sees the man the voice belongs to, and for a solid ten seconds she is struck utterly and entirely _dumb_.

 

Because it’s Steve.  And of course it cannot be Steve, because Steve died almost a century ago saving the world.  But Diana would know those eyes and that face, and those hands and that hair anywhere.  It cannot be Steve, and yet it is Steve. 

 

Diana is so confused it almost _hurts_.

 

“Steve,” she chokes out, past lips that have suddenly gone numb, throat dryer than a desert, and she almost wants to pull the word back. Because now that she has said it, he’s free to deny it, to crush unknowingly this hope that has started to bubble, impossible and foolhardy beneath her breastbone. 

 

Instead though, this impossibility says only, with a light air of puzzlement, “Yes ma’am, Stephen Rockwell Trevor.” And then, still with only polite curiosity, “Have we met before? You look…familiar.”

 

And as he looks at her Diana realizes that there is nothing in his eyes that knows her, and this is almost worse than when she had been pinned to that tarmac in Belgium all those years ago and seen that explosion light up the sky.  Because there had _always_ been something in Steve’s eyes that had known her, even when he had only just woken up on the beach, when he had never met her before.

 

If this is Steve, it is a Steve that _does not know her_. 

 

“You own this shop?” She says instead, still trying desperately to understand what is happening. An alien trick, a doppelganger?  Anything would be more plausible than her long dead lover owning a watch repair store in Paris. 

 

His answer is less than helpful in that regard, as he smiles bashfully, and says proudly, “I do. Bought it after I got out of the service.”

 

And then, with a gesture to his own wrist, where a watch that looks suspiciously like the one she has in her own hand rests, he continues, clearly warming to the topic, “My grandfather had this watch. I was always fascinated by it.  Couldn’t get it out of my head. Turned out I had a knack for repairing them.”

 

And then, with a look that Diana hasn’t seen since he pressed this watch into her hands, told her he loved her and went off to save the day he says, softly, faraway, “Guess after all that time in the army I wanted to try my hand at fixing things for a change.”

 

Diana wants to touch him so badly her hands are actually _trembling_ against the effort of her mind.

 

“Sorry that was…way more information than you probably wanted,” he says, running a nervous hand through his hair and the gentle embarrassment is so much _Steve_ that she can hardly bare it, and his next query is disappointingly professional, “What can I do for you?”

 

“My watch,” she says, practically blurts it out, not sure if she would rather give it to him and have him fix it or tuck it away and turn and _run_ as far away as she can from this man, this Steve who is not Steve.  But she has come all this way, and Diana has faced down monsters scarier than this, and so she almost thrusts the watch at him, inelegantly, and says only, “It’s stopped.” 

 

“Ah, well that I can work with,” he says with some measure of what looks like relief, and reaches for the watch, “Let me have a look at it.”

 

And then he touches it, and for lack of a better term, _all hell breaks loose_.

 

The sound of thunder crashes, as lightning spears through the sky, that when she came into the store only moments ago was cloudless, but Diana is deaf and blind to anything that is not Steve. Steve, who glows with some kind of godly light, whose eyes go white, rolling back into his head. And Diana already has her hands on his lapels, already is flexing her knees to fly them out of this little shop to the nearest hospital when, just as suddenly at it had began _whatever_ this is ends, and his eyes roll back and the light fades and he just _looks_ at her, and Diana is frozen, hardly even daring to _breathe._  

 

“Steve,” she says, she can _only_ say, staring back in those eyes, into _his_ eyes, “ _Steve_.”

 

And Steve Trevor, the first man she ever set eyes upon, took as a lover; the only man she ever loved, the father of her child, looks back at her with eyes that _know_ her, curls his fingers around her face, and says, and _oh_ , the _love_ in his voice, “ _Diana_.”

 

***************************

Epilogue

***************************

 

That Helen bursts into her apartment, knives drawn, battle ready, is perhaps not a surprise given the garbled message Diana is sure she must have left on her daughter’s phone. 

 

That Diana had no idea what to say about this whole thing is perhaps a _massive_ understatement. 

 

“Mom!” Helen shouts, and then, at the sight of Diana unharmed, sitting placidly at the kitchen table, her warried concern turns puzzlement.  She doesn’t lower the knives though, and Diana thinks, with some distant amusement, that somewhere the spirit of Antiope is very proud.

 

Of course, Steve picks that moment to rush in, gun in hand, shouting her name, eyes keen for danger, “Diana!”

 

 _Like father like daughter_ , Diana thinks, her heart impossibly full.

 

Helen’s knives fall to the ground, clatter and lay there forgotten as her daughter stares mutely at the impossible figure of her father, and Steve stares back at her, at his own eyes in their daughter’s face, frozen in the moment, and Diana finally knows exactly what to say.

 

“Steve,” she says, gently, with all the love she never had time to share before, standing so she can take his gun and place it safely away, slip her fingers into his own, as she had all those years ago, “this is Helen Antiope Trevor. Our daughter.”

 

Diana does not know who moves first; perhaps it is Steve, perhaps it is Helen. Perhaps it is even her.  But in the next second they are embracing, and Diana would be hard pressed to tell where all three of them start and end, as instead they are simply one unit, held together by arms and tears and _joy_.

 

This, Diana knows, is _love_.  This is what it was really all for.  The world is flawed, imperfect, but still there is love, and so life goes on, as it should.

 

***************************

 

When Diana awakens the next morning, she has to take a second just to pinch herself, to remind herself that this is all real.  Still, the twinge of pain at the pinch is quickly forgotten by the sight that greets her.  Beside her lays Steve, sleeping still, his chest rising with breath, his heart beating in sync with her own.  His physic, every bit as impressive as it had been a lifetime ago is on fine display, his skin golden under the light of the morning sun, dotted with little red islands where Diana had…made her pleasure known. 

_Oh yes_ , Diana thinks, he is truly an above average representation of his species. 

 

She is loath to ever leave this room, where Steve lays, his presence still a miracle beyond belief, but lovemaking has always left her hungry.  And so, garbed in only her robe, Diana makes her way silently to the kitchen, and as she does, she finds herself once more thinking of Etta, and her question.

 

Her daughter, she knows, is sleeping in the other room, nestled in with her wife and their future grandchild.  Steve lays in her bed, impossibly alive and so much beloved.  Her sword sits out, sharpened, gleaming in the sun with her shield and Antiope’s head piece.  She still has a job that brings a smile to her face, and now too a purpose that brings light to her soul.

 

The air smells of ozone, fresh after a lightning storm, and on her kitchen table there sits a bowl of ambrosia.  

 

And as Diana throws back her head to laugh joyfully, there is one thing she truly believes.

 

She is _happy_. 

 

***************************

 

FIN

 

***************************

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: So I actually hate the whole “we banged once and then you died and now I’m pregnant” trope, but yeah, I watched Wonder Woman and I literally had to write this. Like, had to. Wonder Woman was funny and exciting and, well, wonderful, and jumped entirely onto the ship of the doomed love of Diana and Steve and so here we are. A Zeus facilitated happy ending (because I kind of like the idea he survived, like Ares did) fix it, because if the movies don’t do it and instead ‘Peggy Carter’ Steve Trevor, I need to have at least this. Watch the movie, enjoy, comment and all that jazz.


End file.
